The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Climate change mitigation requires a range of measures to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to the atmosphere. Two of the most important measures include increasing reliance on technologies that generate electricity from renewable resources and reducing the CO2 intensity of fossil energy use. Despite providing reliable and predictable power, geothermal resources are underutilized relative to their vast resource potential. Challenges that have heretofore limited geothermal deployment include (1) the cost and risk of prospecting and well drilling, (2) parasitic power cost of fluid recirculation, and (3) geographically limited range of geologic settings amenable to the current generation of hydrothermal geothermal power systems. Geologic CO2 storage (GCS) has received considerable attention as a means of reducing the CO2 intensity of fossil-energy systems. But the high cost of supplying CO2 by capturing it from exhaust streams requires valuable uses for CO2 to justify those costs.
Wind and solar are renewable energy sources with enormous resource potential. However, such energy sources are difficult to predict and are temporally variable, both diurnally and seasonally. Until major advances in both thermal energy storage (TES) and bulk energy storage (BES) technology are commercialized, wind and solar energy technologies will require back-up, load-following, and peaking power sources, which often emit a significant quantity of CO2. The temporal nature of the major renewable power sources (primarily wind and solar, but in some instances, hydro) may also result in costly power curtailments to other low-CO2 power sources (e.g., nuclear power plants). These drawbacks are setbacks in attempts to mitigate climate change. To effectively meet goals for reduced CO2 emissions, integrating electricity generated from wind and solar resources into power grids requires that their diurnal and seasonal variability and unpredictability be addressed with minimal reliance on CO2-intensive back-up and grid-stabilizing (e.g., load-following) power sources, and without displacing other low-CO2 power sources.